Current traffic control systems waste energy and increase pollution. It's estimated that about 62% of the United States miles driven are urban. Because of the lower fuel efficiency of urban driving, urban driving represents an estimated 80% of United States fuel consumption. In urban driving often 30%-50% fuel is wasted due to continual stopping, and congestion. Even in light traffic, traffic lights appear to operate randomly; they frustrate drivers, cause accidents, waste fuel, and increase pollution. One of the most common reasons for injurious accidents is a driver trying to make a light, going through a red light, and hitting cross traffic. The United States government estimates drivers stop over two times per mile in city traffic—ten times per mile in New York City traffic. That amounts to 24,000 stops per year for an urban driver travelling 12,000 miles. If the driver averages thirty seconds per stop, that would amount 100 hours per year at traffic lights.
In an attempt to move traffic more efficiently, reduce congestion, and lessen delays at stop lights, many solutions have been proposed. For example, smart traffic control systems are mostly based upon real time communication and interaction between devices such as sensors, lights, monitors, central control rooms, and the like. This interactivity typically requires wires, phone lines, modems, transmitters, computers, and radio frequency devices, which transmit and receive data between traffic controllers, for example, stoplights and directive signs. In this approach, the system reacts to the traffic and vice versa. Smart traffic systems are limited by being expensive and complex. Any system that relies upon communication between devices be it wire or wireless, will usually be unreliable and/or very expensive to implement. Any new wire, radio signal, sensor, is met with significant cost and implementation barriers. Further, the collective failure of all of these systems is that they try to reconcile what are basically two random variables, traffic lights and drivers, and one constant: the speed limit.
What is needed is a cheap and easy to implement traffic control system that avoid the disadvantages of the prior art.